


off-key anthem

by inlovewithnight



Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship, Fall Out Boy
Genre: 2014 Winter Olympics, M/M, Olympics AU, good feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:30:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1242943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pete is a figure skater going for his last shot at a medal. Gabe is a skeleton racer using his dual citizenship for good. It's inevitable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	off-key anthem

_One of the great stories of Sochi, of course, is Pete Wentz, American figure skater who fought his way back from his fourth knee surgery to make it on the team one more time. He was photographed getting off the plane in a t-shirt that read ‘Too Old For This Shit,’ a level of self-awareness that doesn’t match the program he unveiled at Nationals._

_According to his coach, Wentz’s program is based entirely on math: he’s not doing the big-ticket jumps that would take him over the top and blow his knees up again, but instead every element of his program is calculated so that if he hits all of them perfectly, he’s a force to be reckoned with. (At this stage, everyone assumes he gets 100% in artistry. One thing that’s never been in question is his creativity!)_

“He’s older than Plushenko,” Pete reads aloud from his phone. “Why don’t they just go ahead and say ‘he’s old as balls’?”

“Journalistic ethics?” Marian guesses. “Who knows, Pete?”

“This is just a blog, not a news place. Blog ethics are different.” Pete sighs and drops his phone back into his bag. “I’m gonna warm up.”

“Slow. Careful. Make sure you stretch.”

“I know the rules. I’m old as balls, I’m not stupid.”

“Please stop saying balls.”

“Sorry.”

“When are your parents getting in, again?”

“Tomorrow.” Pete bends forward and touches his toes, holding the stretch for a long moment before straightening up. “I feel good, you know?”

“I’m glad.”

“I think this isn’t going to suck.”

“That’s all I’m asking for.”

Pete curls his lip at her. “I think what I like best about you is your high standards for me.”

“I do my best.” She takes her own phone out and frowns at it. “Warm up, stretch, do workout B, okay? Do not trash-talk anyone and don’t show off. I’ll be here until you’re done, and then I’ve gotta run over and make sure the kids aren’t killing each other.”

“Should’ve left the kids at home and focused totally on me, Marian.”

“They qualified fair and square. Move your ass.”

Pete slips off his skate guards and hits the ice, letting himself take his time warming up in slow, lazy laps. A few people glare at him like he’s in the way. Others stare at him like they’re seeing a ghost. Being an old man at the Olympics is weird.

He wouldn’t have done this if Marian hadn’t told him she thought he had one more in him. One more chance at a medal. Robotic knees and all. He trusts his coach more than he trusts himself-- _way_ more than he trusts himself. He’s usually wrong about everything. She never is.

He rounds the far end of the ice and pushes himself off into a low jump, just a single, just to feel his knee bend and click and release and then catch his weight again on landing. Not bad. Not too bad.

**

After the workout, his day is clear. He could go watch qualifying runs on the ski slopes, or try to hang out with the snowboarders like he isn’t old enough to be most of their dad, or… touristy things, presumably, he isn’t totally sure of the tourist setup in Sochi.

Instead, he goes back to the athletes’ village and wanders around with his iPod on, the best strategy he’s found for peoplewatching without being creepy.

The village is great for that. In less than an hour he has a working theory that the Finnish men’s hockey team is planning an orgy with their skiing women, that luge dudes are truly the weirdest ones around, and that the Spanish figure skater kid is going to lose his virginity to _someone_ from Team Canada, it’s just a question of who gets there first.

Which, hey, good for him. Oh Canada indeed.

He’s headed back to his room when he sees the guy. He’s tall, wearing a jacket Pete doesn’t immediately recognize, which stands out because by this point in his fucked-up old-as-balls career he knows most national get-ups at a glance. He’s also wearing sunglasses and a stocking cap, so Pete can’t really see his face at all, but he really gets the feeling that the guy is looking at him.

He tugs his earbuds down and waves. “Hi.”

The guy nods to him and crosses the sidewalk to stand in front of him. Pete has to tilt his head a little to look him in the face.

“You’re that dude,” the guy says.

Pete shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Figure skater dude. The one who gets disqualified a lot.”

Pete winces and turns his iPod off. “That was all years ago.” He’s been _really_ good for a _really_ long time, but still, everybody’s always going to see him as the guy who had his World routine disqualified for wearing makeup and feathers glued to his face. Or the guy who picked a fight with Elvis Stojko in the practice rink. Or the guy who did a backflip to show the judges he didn’t give a fuck, but blew his knee out on the landing.

Fuck, he’s done dumb stuff in his career. He kind of can’t believe they ever let him come back.

“I’m all about the rules now,” he says, blinking up at the guy again. “And you are?”

“Saporta.” The guy offers his hand, clad in a bright green mitten with a sunburst on the back. “Gabriel Saporta.”

Pete shakes hands and tries to read the writing on Saporta’s jacket. “What’s your event?”

“I do skeleton.” The guy holds one hands up, scowls at his mitten, and pulls it off so he can throw up horns more effectively. “The most metal of sports.”

“Dude.” Pete has to laugh a little. “I can’t actually argue with that.”

“I didn’t think so.” Saporta tugs his mitten back on. “You trying to place my accent?”

It’s so completely uncool to get caught doing that in the athlete village. Normal, but uncool. “It sounds like East Coast US, but I know you’re not repping Team USA.”

“Uh. No.” Saporta has a nice laugh. “No, man, I was raised and educated and learned about punk rock in the US, but I was born in Uruguay, and that’s where I slide for.”

“Uruguay?” Pete tries to think back to every world event he’s ever been to. “I didn’t know Uruguay did… sports.”

“Harsh.” Saporta takes his hat off and runs his fingers through dark, curly hair. 

“I meant…”

“We kick ass at futbol, for one thing.” Pete blushes and opens his mouth to apologize, but Saporta just laughs and throws him a rope. “No, man, I’m kidding. We don’t do winter sports. I’m the second dude Uruguay has ever sent to winter games. And the other one was a slalom douche.”

“Is skeleton douche better than slalom douche?”

Saporta tugs his hat back on. “I wouldn’t know. I’m awesome.”

Pete doesn’t know how to roll with that. He stands there like a tool, and after a minute Saporta grins again and walks away, calling over his shoulder, “See you around, man.”

Pete’s face is so red it hurts. He can feel it in the chilly air. “Fuck,” he whispers.

**

The day of the men’s short program skate, he knows he should take it easy. Marian actually wrote him out a plan for the day, broken down to the half-hour. Large chunks of it say REST in block letters.

But he can’t. He can’t just sit still and run through his program over and over again in his head. He will actually lose his shit if he does that. He needs to move.

Earbuds in, iPod on, he walks around the village and then hops on the bus to the luge and skeleton runs. They’re doing first heats of one of them today. It’s something to watch that he doesn’t have to think about or engage with. Empty motion to fill his brain.

He rests his hands on his knees during the bus ride, rubbing his thumbs over the surgical scars over and over again. He shouldn’t even be here. This is a gift. He needs to be grateful.

Thinking about that makes him even edgier. He pulls his iPod out and scrolls past the music to his folder of pictures. His son, back home, squinting against the California sun to make faces at Daddy’s phone where the camera lives. His brother and sister mugging at his last birthday party. His parents, who are around here somewhere, but won’t come see him until after he skates, because he’s superstitious as hell and they roll with it.

He knows he won’t let any of them down if he fucks up. But he’ll still feel like it.

He stands with the shifting crowd at the end of the skeleton run, people waiting for their guy to make it to the bottom, then quick back-pats and good-jobs or we’ll-fix-that-on-the-next-one and they all walk away again. He lingers. He doesn’t have anywhere else to go, except resting, which he refuses to do. He might as well stay and watch the entire heat. Marian’s going to be mad at him anyway.

He squints up to the top of the run and sees a guy in white, blue, and green with a fucking sunburst on the chest of his suit. Oh, fuck. 

He really hopes he didn’t subconsciously do this on purpose, but he probably did.

“Gabriel Saporta of Uruguay,” the loudspeaker intones.

Saporta waves to the judges and places his sled neatly on the mark. He tugs his helmet visor into place. His body is covered head to toe in the helmet and speed suit, including the bulge in the dickular area, which Pete knows he isn’t supposed to stare at--there are _manners_ at the Olympics--but he’s a terrible person, so he does until Saporta gets down in his set position to go.

The gun goes off and he hurtles down the track headfirst at some kind of ridiculous rate of speed. It makes Pete feel a little sick to his stomach just watching it, actually. No, that’s not right. He’s felt a _little_ sick watching all of them. Watching a guy he actually knows by name do it makes him feel a _lot_ sick.

The announcer reads Saporta’s time off, and Pete has no idea if it’s good or bad except for the fact that a couple of people clap and a tall woman in a sunburst jacket calls “Yes! Very good!” Pete watches her from the corner of his eye, and sure enough, Saporta walks over to her from the course.

“You’re ranked second. Very good.” She pats him on the shoulder. “I think that will hold, too, for this heat. Do not screw up on the next one, hm?”

“Thanks, Ella.” He kisses her on the cheek and turns to walk away, then stops. “Skater dude.”

Pete clears his throat and waves weakly. “Hi.”

“Shouldn’t you be in a bubble getting your zen on?”

“That’s not really my style.”

Saporta grins and walks over to him, gesturing at the iPod. “Let me check your style?” Pete hands it over and Saporta grins more. “Yeah, yeah, I’m into it. Do you really do your short program to EDM?”

“Sometimes. Not this time.”

“That’s too bad. I want to see that.”

“It’s all on YouTube.”

Saporta laughs and hands him his iPod back. “Do you mind if I come watch you? Since you came out here to watch me?”

Pete’s heart hammers ineffectively at his chest. “I didn’t…” Saporta raises an eyebrow and he cuts himself off. “I mean, it’s a free country.”

He expects Saporta to laugh again, but instead he just looks at Pete, long and measuring. “Well then,” he says finally. “I’ll be there. With a vuvuzela.”

Ella shouts at him and he jogs off before Pete can reply. Pete’s pretty sure Ella’s yelling at him about keeping his legs moving. She and Marian are two of a kind.

**

He has to catch the shuttle back before Saporta does his second run. There’s no time to check the skeleton stats when he gets off the bus; Marian is waiting, furious at him for not taking his phone, and practically drags him to the locker room by his hair.

“You’re not prepared,” she says through clenched teeth. “Honestly, why did you waste all the time and money to come here if you’re not going to take it seriously?”

“I’m taking it seriously.”

“Then why aren’t you _prepared_?”

“I’m not like everybody else you coach!” He pinches his thighs through his sweatpants, digging his fingers in as hard as he can. “I need to do things my own way!”

How many hundreds of thousands of times has he said that, and she still doesn’t get it? Nobody gets it. Nobody thinks he should be here.

Marian sighs and steps back, rubbing her temples. “You know yourself best.”

“That’s the theory.”

“Get dressed, please, and meet me at the warm-up rink.”

He nods and bolts into the locker room, ignoring the other skaters who are watching them, wide-eyed and whispering. Wentz fighting with another coach. Wentz being a big dramatic attention-seeker all over the place.

He pinches himself again, all up and down his thighs, then makes himself get changed. He’s not going to let them all be right. He’s going to skate and he’s going to skate well. He’s going to do his performance like Saporta coming down the track--smooth and perfect and all on instinct, no thinking. Muscle memory only. Deactivate the brain.

Marian would say he doesn’t use his brain anyway. So would his parents. So would his ex.

But he’s thirty-four fucking years old, not a twenty-year-old proving people right because he believes shit about burning out instead of fading away.

He’s going to do this for his kid, who doesn’t think he’s a fuck-up yet, and those skating-fan kids who tag him on Instagram when they land a triple lutz. That’s what matters.

And if Saporta makes it in time, well, that’s a bonus, too. Not falling on his ass in front of the hotties has been his motivation in skating for a really long time.

**

When he comes out of the kiss and cry, Saporta is…. there. Just standing there. Being taller than everyone associated with figure skating.

“That was some cool shit,” he says, stepping right in front of two journalists to get to Pete first. “You were awesome.”

“Thanks.” Pete sips his water and glances at the journalists. They both wrote really mean shit about him after Nationals a couple of times. “You want to get out of here?”

Saporta grins. “Yeah. Lead the way.”

Pete leads him to the locker room, but doesn’t stop to change; he just grabs his phone and leads Saporta out the back. “How was your second heat?”

“I dropped to third overall, but I’m feeling good about it.” His hand closes around Pete’s elbow, tugging him to a halt. “I really did like your skating.”

“Thank you.” Pete glances up at him, then stares down at his shoes. He left his skates with Marian. She’s going to yell at him again for that. “Where do you want to go?”

“Let’s go over to the snowboard area. They’re done for the day. We can sit beside the giant doll thing and talk about how it looks like a dick.”

“Matryoshka.” Pete says the word extra-carefully, like how he learned it with Bronx when they looked at the kids’ book about Russia he got to explain where he was going. “I wonder if there are really smaller dolls in the big one.”

“The one at the snowboard course? I doubt it.”

“Then it’s not really a matryoshka. It’s just a big thing that looks like a dick.”

Saporta thinks for a minute. “I’m still into it. Let’s go.”

The shuttle isn’t supposed to go to the snowboard area, since it’s done for the day, but Saporta sweet-talks the drive into taking them anyway. Pete curls his hands inside his sleeves and watches him. He has nice eyes. Nice cheekbones. A nice face.

Pete is an embarrassment of a human being.

“So,” he says when they’re sitting at the base of the matryoshka. “Uh. How’d you get into skeleton, anyway? I don’t even know how you train for that.”

Saporta lies back in the snow and laughs. “You don’t, really. I mean, my training is mostly lifting weights and running. There’s like two months a year I get on the sled.”

“But how’d you get into at all? How did you even _hear_ of it.”

Saporta sighs softly, lifting his head enough to turn the collar of his jacket up. “My girlfriend broke up with me.”

“Oh.” Pete feels like his chest is caving in. “You have a girlfriend.”

“No.” Saporta holds his hand up, pointing at the sky. “I _had_ a girlfriend. Who left me because being bisexual in practice instead of in theory was weird. Specifically, me wanting to hang out with my ex-boyfriend Rob was weird. Whatever. Anyway. She left me, and I was really sad and shit, and my brother took me to Lake Placid because he said we could go skiing.”

“You ski, too?”

“No.” Saporta glances at him apologetically. “It’s a weird story.”

“I won’t interrupt again. Go for it.”

“I don’t mind if you interrupt.”

“I want to hear the story, though.” Pete watches him for a minute. “So you’re at Lake Placid, not skiing.”

“Right. I told my brother I didn’t want to ski, I wanted to get wasted. And he said, Gabe, you are a loser and ruining the vacation I took you on out of the goodness of my heart.”

“Is that what people call you? Gabe?”

“Yeah.” Saporta--Gabe--grins at him and the corners of his eyes go all crinkly. “People who are in the know call me that.”

“Can I call you that?”

“I’m telling you my fuckin’ life story, that makes you in the know, doesn’t it?” Gabe laughs again and kicks his legs in slow arcs. “Anyway, so we have this huge fight and I stomp off by myself and end up at the track where they run, like, clinics for randoms to learn how to do it. And I had my credit card in my pocket so I said fuck it and did a clinic.”

Pete waits, digging his fingers through the snow, but Gabe is quiet. “And?”

“And it was so much fucking fun.” Gabe isn’t laughing now. He sounds… distant. Pete sneaks a glance at him and sees that he’s staring up at the sky like he’s having a vision. “It was like I went faster than all the bullshit.”

“That’s how I feel when I jump,” Pete offers after another too-quiet moment. “Like I’m flying away from it.”

“I did the run as many times as they’d let me. Way more than I paid for.” Now Gabe does laugh, a little bit. “I think they could tell they had me hooked, and I was just not-shitty enough that they wanted to keep me until Ella could get there and nail me down.”

Pete thinks back to nights he spent at the rink, doing jumps over and over until his legs shook too much to hold him up, trying to make that tiny window when he was _above_ all the hurt last just a little bit longer.

He doesn’t say anything, but he bumps his foot against Gabe’s in the snow.

“Ella rode my ass the whole rest of the time I was there. I thought it was the craziest shit I ever heard. I was a high-school Spanish teacher, not a fucking athlete. I got a C- in gym class, right? I told her no way and went home.”

Pete turns his head. “How did she get you in the end?”

“Rob the ex-boyfriend.” Gabe laughs out loud and rolls over onto his stomach, hiding his face against his arms. “I am such a loser, sorry.”

Pete hates Rob the ex-boyfriend so fucking much. “Tell me! I want to know!”

“I went over to his place and got drunk and told him about my vacation and he got so mad at me he kicked me out of his apartment without my shoes. He couldn’t _believe_ I said no to someone wanting to train me for an Olympic sport.” Gabe makes a face. “I told him, it’s not like it’s a REAL Olympic sport, it’s a made-up one, and that made him open the door enough to throw the shoes at me.”

“Then what happened?”

“Oh, we had a huge fight and his neighbor called the cops and we talked it all out in the back of the cop car, and I agreed to call Ella back and say I’d try. Happy ending.”

“Wow.”

“I mean, the first two years I was doing it I blew every competition I went to, and then she told me Team USA didn’t want me because I was an asshole, and I said no problem, I’ve got dual citizenship. Nobody has ever been that mad at me since I got kicked off the high-school field trip to DC and my dad had to drive to Maryland to pick me up.”

“What did you do to get kicked off the trip?”

“Had sex.” Gabe pauses to sip from his water bottle. “With this girl. My dad ended up marrying her mom, it’s super-weird. Anyway, uh, where was I… oh, right, I wrote a letter to the Uruguayan Ministry of Tourism and Sport. Well. My dad wrote it, because my Spanish is remedial at best.”

“I thought you were a Spanish teacher.”

“You can teach Spanish in an American high school if you can read a Taco Bell menu, dude. So we sorta told the Ministry that Team USA didn’t want me because of personality conflicts and also a subtle pattern of racism, which was _true_ , and they gave me a training grant, and… yeah! Yeah. Here I am. And I’m ranked third after two heats.” He takes another drink and looks at Pete. Somehow, over the course of that story, they’ve ended up really close together. Pete doesn’t remember moving, but here they are. “Where are you ranked now, by the way?”

“Bronze.”

“No shit.”

“I’ve gotta hope for a perfect long program and for two other guys to bite it.”

“I’ll hit ‘em with a pipe if you want.”

Pete laughs despite himself and puts his hand over Gabe’s mouth. “Dude. We don’t even joke about that in skating anymore.”

Gabe grins and gently guides Pete’s hand down from his face. “Fair enough.” Still holding Pete’s hand, he shifts onto his back and draws Pete in. “You should kiss me.”

Pete closes his eyes and does.

Marian is going to fucking kill him.

**

The next day is Gabe’s last two runs and Pete’s long program skate. He can’t stand out all day, partly because he needs more focus for his long program and partly because Marian is watching him closely now.

Gabe texts him in the morning, though, and that’s--that’s nice. It’s really nice. He’s in his usual bleak, existential pre-big-skate horror and anxiety, and a dumb little text that Gabe’s going to go extra-fast down the track so he can be at the skating to cheer Pete on is really nice.

It doesn’t keep him from puking twice, but nothing would.

“I’d be fine if I wasn’t ranked going in,” he mumbles at Marian as she comes into the bathroom with Gatorade and a towel. “You know? I don’t freak out like this if I’m already out of contention or underdogging it.”

“You’re more comfortable as an underdog.” She wipes his mouth with the ease of practice and then hands him the bottle. “But that’s not going to work this time, because of the math. Right?”

“Right.” He closes his eyes and thumps his head against the wall. The math. He’s got to skate to the math.

“You can do this.”

“I know.” He doesn’t sound like he means it at all.

“Pete. You can _do_ this.”

“And if I don’t?”

She’s quiet for a moment. He thumps his head again and waits.

“Bronx will still love you,” she says finally. “Your family will still love you. There will still be birthday cake.”

“Will you still love me?”

“Yes, Pete.”

“Even though I’m needy and pathetic?”

“Yes, Pete.”

“Thanks.” He sits for another moment, then sighs and twists open the Gatorade. “I’m gonna drink this and text with the hot guy I made out with on the snowboard slope last night.”

“Peter Wentz. You were out on cold ground last night? What about your legs? Cold muscles!”

He giggles a little and tries to squeeze between the toilet and the wall while she swats at him. “Right. I wasn’t supposed to tell you about that.”

“Keep your mind on your _program_ , not this hot guy.”

“He’s very inspirational?”

Marian sighs and stands up. “Only you, Pete.”

“Yeah.” He tilts his head back and drinks. “Only me.”

**

Gabe texts him a time after his first run, which is completely meaningless without context, but when he pulls up the results page on his phone he sees that Gabe is doing well. Really well.

_good luck_ he texts back. _sending you all the mojo_.

The reply comes fast. _noooo keep some of that mojo for yourself! xoxo_

Pete smiles and eats the banana Marian shoves at him. Soon she’ll leave so he can have an hour of freaky emotional zone-out time before they go do warm-ups. He kind of hopes Gabe keeps texting, because freaky emotional zone-out time is all well and good but now he’s sort of invested in the results of the skeleton.

He doesn’t hear from him and doesn’t hear from him and doesn’t hear from him, and he’s just about convinced himself that Gabe had some kind of horrible accident in his last run. He broke his neck, or something, he sliced his hand off on the sled runners, _something_ awful must have happened. Or maybe he had a moment of clarity and realized he wanted nothing to do with Pete anymore. Maybe he was going directly home to Rob the ex-boyfriend and they would open a Spanish-language tutoring center and he would laugh when Pete was mentioned in an ESPN documentary years from now.

“I feel exceptionally shitty,” he tells Marian while they walk to the locker room. “I’m probably going to throw up again.”

“Do your breathing exercises.”

“I feel like my chest is caving in.”

“Do your visualizations.”

“Marian--” He cuts off because his phone buzzes with a text. He drops it, trying to fumble it out of his pocket with his Team USA mittens on, and for a minute he thinks it’s broken, he killed the last text he will ever receive from the guy who _made out with him on a snowboarding slope at the Olympics_ , that’s, like, fairy-tale shit that doesn’t come around twice, especially to someone already in his 30s and way too old for his own sport.

But the phone lights up after he bangs it with his fist a few times, and he sees that Gabe didn’t send him a message, but a picture.

A picture of his silver medal.

“Oh, fuck _yes_ ,” Pete says, staring at the screen. “Fuck yes.”

“What is it?” Marian asks. “Did someone take out that Spanish kid?”

“What? No.” Pete shoves his phone back in his pocket. “Personal.”

Her eyes narrow. “A positive personal? A personal you can use to motivate yourself to perform well?”

“If I say no, are you going to hurt me?”

“Probably.” She gives him a little push to get him moving toward the locker room again. “But not until after you skate.”

**

Pete has a deal with himself. If his free skate is clean, he can do his exhibition skate to Jay-Z and exit the professional skating world with a double bird to the judge’s table.

It will be empty at the exhibition skate, but that’s okay. His message will still be clear.

Fuck, if this was two knee surgeries ago, he’d give the backflip another try.

But if his skate _isn’t_ clean, he’ll do his skate to My Chemical Romance and leave all the fuckers confused about why he was wearing a red wig. Because fuck them all, that’s why.

He thinks about that all through his warm-up, through Marian’s list of reminders and visualizations, through the period of blind keeping-it-together terror while he waits for his turn to go out on the ice. He visualizes his program he’s going to skate right now. He visualizes his Jay-Z program. He visualizes his My Chem program. Then he starts over.

He hates waiting. It’s the worst part by far.

He’s wanted this for such a long fucking time. Since he saw Katerina Witt skate and knew he wanted to _do_ that. He already knew that he was an athlete by a trick of genetics, and he knew he could be a performer through force of will, but if he could put them both together, if he could skate like she skated…

It started there and ended up here. So fucking far away. So many years and on the other side of the planet. All of his frustration and anger and exhaustion and inspiration, all of his joy and mania and hard work and failures. Here he is.

It’s his turn, and he skates out into the lights.

**

Gabe is waiting at the kiss and cry again, though this time he lets Pete’s parents get to him first.

“Honey,” his mom sobs, pulling him close. “I’m so proud of you.”

Pete nods and blinks, too stunned to say anything that makes sense. She hugs him tight, then passes him off to his dad, who does the same.

“Um,” he says finally. “I, uh. I’ve gotta… the ceremony…”

His mom dissolves into tears again, but before he has to figure out if he should hug her again, he’s pulled into someone else’s arms. Someone way taller than him, so he figures it out pretty soon. Gabe.

“Congratulations, dude!” Gabe still has his medal around his neck; it actually hits Pete right in the face when Gabe slaps him on the back. “I made out with a gold medalist. Holy shit.”

Pete grins, even though he still feels like he’s off on a cloud somewhere. “Wanna do it again later?”

“Forget making out, I’m gonna get to third base.” Gabe cups Pete’s face in his hands and kisses him, right there in the middle of all the skaters and journalists and crew. Flashes go off from phones and cameras, and Pete thinks distantly that there go another fifty blog posts, right there.


End file.
